Retailers’ Thanksgiving Deals Cut Black Friday Spending

A shopper holds boxes of boots above her head as she makes her way through a crowd during Black Friday shopping at a Belk store in Oglethorpe Mall in Savannah, Ga. (AP Photo/The Morning News, Richard Burkhart)

Sales on the day after the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S.
fell 1.8 percent from last year to $11.2 billion, according to a
report today from ShopperTrak, a Chicago-based researcher. That
compares with a 6.6 percent gain in Black Friday sales in 2011.
Foot traffic this year rose 3.5 percent 307.7 million store
visits, ShopperTrak said.

Retailers have turned Black Friday, once a one-day event
after Thanksgiving, into a week’s worth of deals and discounts.
With the earlier openings, online deals starting as far back as
last weekend and new promotions stores are offering to win
return visits, shopping malls were less hectic on Black Friday
this year, said Ramesh Swamy, an analyst at Deloitte LLP.

“Retailers are going to pace themselves and start rolling
out different types of promotions to keep consumers
interested,” Swamy said today in a telephone interview from
Pasadena, California. Shoppers visiting stores this weekend are
getting coupons that can be used starting next week or after
Dec. 1 to lure them back, he said.

With consumers facing a sluggish economy and the threat of
tax increases that may result if Washington doesn’t avert the
so-called fiscal cliff, this weekend will serve as a barometer
of what’s to come for retailers in the next five weeks. One
early sign is that online sales rose 21 percent yesterday and 17
percent on Thanksgiving, according to IBM Benchmark.

Rising Sales

“This was a decent two days, and so that’s a good base and
foundation for the rest of the holiday season,” Bill Martin,
founder and executive vice president of ShopperTrak, said in a
telephone interview today. “It will just take time see to see
if consumers spent all their money or if they’ll take another
bite of the apple as the season matures.”

Retailers’ Thanksgiving day deals likely attracted some of
the spending that usually would have taken place on Black
Friday, Martin said in the statement.

The National Retail Federation says holiday sales,
including online, will rise 4.1 percent to about $586.1 billion
this year, compared with a 5.6 percent gain in 2011. Online
sales expected to gain 12 percent to $96 billion this year,
three times as fast as total sales.

One reason may be that retailers have been putting many of
their deals on the Web first. Target offered the same discounts
it normally would reserve for stores on its website on Nov. 21.
Staples Inc. posted what it called pre-Black Friday deals online
on Nov. 18.

Mobile Shopping

Mobile shopping also continued to gain popularity. EBay
Inc.’s PayPal said the number of customers shopping through
their tablets or smartphones more than doubled on Thanksgiving
from last year, while mobile payment volume nearly tripled on
Black Friday. IBM said 24 percent of consumers used a mobile
device to visit a retailer’s site, up from 9.8 percent last
year.

Wal-Mart, which offered two-day online-only Black Friday
specials, said traffic through its mobile apps tripled and that
mobile accounted for 45 percent of all Walmart.com traffic on
Thanksgiving.

“This is the year that mobile finally went mainstream,”
Anuj Nayar, a PayPal spokesman, said in a telephone interview
yesterday. Many people finished Thanksgiving meals and then
shopped on their tablets or phones, he said.

Forever 21 Inc., the closely held fast-fashion retailer,
earlier this month introduced a revamped version of its mobile
application that includes a barcode-scanning feature.

Boundaries Blurring

Shoppers can scan merchandise in stores to add items to an
online wish-list, select different colors and sizes or show
friends what they’re browsing, as the company looks to “blur
the boundaries between in-store and online shopping,” Linda
Chang, global marketing director, said in an e-mail.

Retailers also continued the trend of ever-earlier
openings. Wal-Mart and Toys “R” Us Inc. opened at 8 p.m. on
Thanksgiving, while Target pushed its openings to 9 p.m. to draw
more families.

“Based on the popularity off the traffic, we’re going to
see more Thursday promotions next year than we did this year,”
ShopperTrak’s Martin said.

Mall traffic was heaviest from midnight to 2 a.m. and
weakened later in the morning, Adrienne Tennant, an analyst at
Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Washington, said today in a note.
Sales for the rest of the weekend will top last year, she said.

Earlier Starts

Not everyone was a fan of the earlier starts. While Kellie
Prater, 39, got in line at Target in Trotwood, Ohio, at 6:30
p.m. on Thanksgiving to get a dollhouse and other toys when it
opened at 9 p.m., she said she wished the store didn’t open
until Friday morning.

“These people should not open until 5 a.m. or 6 a.m.,”
said Prater, a stay-at-home mother of three. “Let people be
with their family -- they’re minimum wage.”

Fast Retailing Co.’s Uniqlo stores opened yesterday at 8
a.m., compared with 6 a.m. last year, because “there’s not so
many customers in the morning” and it helped employees, said
Shin Odake, chief executive officer of its U.S. unit. Online
consumers appeared to be waiting for Cyber Monday to make
purchases, he said.

Miranda Miller, 34, visited Target on Thursday night and
left because the line “was just way too long,” she said in an
interview today at Westfarms Mall in Farmington, Connecticut.
The homemaker and mother of four boys from Mechanicsburg,
Pennsylvania, went to Kohl’s Corp. and Target stores yesterday
with five $10-off coupons and said she didn’t have to wait in
lines to check out.

Consumer Confidence

Retailers had increasingly confident consumers visiting
stores this weekend. More Americans this month said the U.S.
economy will improve than at any time in the past decade,
according to the Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index. The share of
households saying it would get better rose to 37 percent, the
highest since March 2002. A year ago, the measure showed a
record number of consumers said it was a bad time to spend.

A rebound in housing and the job market, along with a drop
in household debt, has led additional consumers to say they’ll
buy more this holiday, according to a survey this month by the
Credit Union National Association and the Consumer Federation of
America. Of those polled, 12 percent said they would boost
spending, the highest level since 15 percent in 2007, while 38
percent said they would spend less.

Less Extravagant

Karen Carlow, a 57-year-old from Coventry, Rhode Island,
said the damage caused by superstorm Sandy made her “think more
about what other people lost.” Carlow said in an interview at
the Crystal Mall in Waterford, Connecticut, that she was less
willing to make extravagant purchases this year.

Others are spending carefully as the unemployment rate,
while down from almost 9 percent a year ago, remains above 7
percent. Deb Bettini, 56, plans to spend about $300 on holiday
gifts, about the same as last year and mostly in the form of
gift cards to retailers such as Lowe’s Cos. and Panera Bread
Co., she said said today after spending $27.04 on pajamas and
socks at a Roses discount store in Reidsville, North Carolina.

“There is a lot of belt-tightening by companies going on
and people are still losing their jobs,” said Bettini, who with
her husband, Randy, raises grapes, mushrooms and vegetables on a
family farm. They also plan to give gift baskets with homemade
cider. “People are trying to get by the best way they can.”

‘Super Saturday’

Holiday sales may get a boost from there being 32 days
between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year compared with 30 in
2011, Jennifer Davis, an analyst at Lazard Capital Markets in
New York, wrote in a note.

“Because of the extra weekend versus last year, we’re
going to have a true Super Saturday,” said Deloitte’s Swamy,
referring to the Saturday before Christmas which vies with Black
Friday as the busiest shopping day of the year.

Weather may help gains too as colder temperatures increase
sales of sweaters, boots, scarves, gloves and jackets, according
to weather-data provider Planalytics Inc. Last year’s Black
Friday was the warmest in five years, the Berwyn, Pennsylvania-based firm said in an e-mail.

New fashion trends may also aid purchases. Teens are
dressing up more this year, with guys donning sports jackets,
button-downs, and skinny ties with jeans, and girls buying tops
and bottoms “that sparkle and shine,” for daytime-to-evening
looks, Michael Leedy, chief merchandising officer at American
Eagle Outfitters Inc., said in an e-mail.

Free Shipping

The company is offering 40 percent off all items in store
and online from Nov. 21 through Nov. 25, he said, as well as
free shipping from the Web.

Gap Inc., the biggest U.S. specialty-apparel retailer, saw
busy stores yesterday as customers responded to offers of $19
sweaters and $5 kids and baby graphic Ts from midnight to noon.

“We’re encouraged by what we’re seeing out there,” Mark
Breitbard, president of Gap Inc.’s North America division for
its namesake brand, said in a telephone interview yesterday.
“There’s a lot of energy in the malls right now, which is
great.”